Dynamic Response of In-Line Pile Groups Subjected to Vehicle Impact
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 143, Issue 7
Abstract
Groups of in-line piles connected by beams are being used to contain errant vehicles for roadside safety and perimeter protection of sensitive infrastructure. The effectiveness of in-line groups of piles to safely redirect or stop approaching vehicles has not been well investigated from the geotechnical point of view. In this paper, the performance of barriers is examined through full-scale crash tests and numerical simulations. The full-scale crash tests consisted of two different configurations of piles and beams as well as two different soil types: one was in loose sand and the other in hard clay. Both barriers were subjected to vehicle impact: one by a medium-duty truck and the other by a pickup truck. The barriers successfully contained the impacting vehicles. Detailed finite-element models of the barriers and the soil were developed and combined with the vehicle models to simulate the dynamic events. Comparison between predicted and measured behavior was used to calibrate the models. Additional simulations were performed to evaluate the effect of major structural and geotechnical design parameters including soil strength, pile spacing, and number of piles on the impact response of these systems. Practical recommendations are drawn from the experimental and numerical work.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the support of this extensive project. We also wish to recognize the crash testing crew at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute led by Mr. Gary Gerke and Mr. Dick Zimmer. The timely help of the researchers at TTI, especially Dr. Abu-Odeh and Mr. Dusty Arrington in crash simulations, is gratefully appreciated. The authors also wish to acknowledge the Texas A&M High Performance Research Computing Facility (http://hprc.tamu.edu) for providing computing resources for the research numerical analyses.
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Information
Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 143 • Issue 7 • July 2017
Copyright
©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 28, 2016
Accepted: Nov 15, 2016
Published online: Mar 9, 2017
Published in print: Jul 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Aug 9, 2017
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